How to make your Alexa, Compete.com, Neilsen Ratings Improve Quickly

SEO SEO SEO tons of people I know say that SEO is the key to a good Alexa Ranking.  The fact is none of these things will make your rankings or ratings go up on any of these services.  The facts are (and we couldn’t print this if it were not true, notice there are no marks, no disclaimers, this is just the raw truth)… the facts are… Alexa, Compete.com Neilsen and other rating sites are MISLEADING you.

I can’t stress this enough.  AGAIN NOTICE THAT NO ONE IS TAKING ME TO COURT FOR TEARING APART THEIR BUSINESS.  I’ll say it again.  ALEXA, COMPETE.COM, NEILSEN AND OTHER SITES that DO NOT HAVE DIRECT ACCESS TO WEB SERVER LOGS are MISLEADING YOU!

Now that I’ve said this you need to know why.  The ONLY accurate measure for traffic is to count the TCP/IP connections going to the webservers.  That’s it.  It’s not rocket science as these pie-in-the-sky wannabe informative websites will have you think.  They will talk about scientific algorithms that are +/- 20 – 30%.  It’s just not true.  This is a lie.  I said it.  It’s a lie.  I can prove it all day long and not one of them will do a thing about it.

They buy bits of information from various ISP’s (This information is not consistant, checked, regulated, or verifiable btw).  They use toolbars and spy on the toolbar users keeping track of where they go and what they do.  The probelm with this is HUGE.  First of all a regional site could have a TON of regional traffic and if only a few people have the toolbars installed then poof complete inaccuracy on the toolbar side of things.

Same with ISP’s.  If you are a regional site in Wisconsin then your readers will use Time Warner (for the most part) and not Comcast, or other ISPS.   So that’s not going to help anyone show what type of traffic your site is getting. 

The only way to know for sure is to check the web logs.  So how do we identify who is who on the Internet?  That is not a simple task.  The web logs can be tweaked as well, things can be added, things can be taken off… after all it’s just a text file.  You can load code on the website and count things that way but if you are ad network for instance, chances are you are going to be the victim of a host file bypass.  People download lists of places that serve ads and put them into their hosts file to redirect them to localhost.  This way when you surf a site you don’t have to wait for the annoying ads to load, they just won’t load.  If the code is from one of these websites then your traffic isn’t going to get counted either.

So the only way to improve your website ranking quickly is to install the Alexa toolbar, and have all your friends install it and have them add your website as one of their default home pages.  This way when they open their browser Alexa will count your site.  Since the other companies buy data from Alexa it will improve your rankings across the board.  As little as 5 toolbar installs can make a huge difference in your website ranking.